


ten of cups (life overflows)

by Tavina



Category: Dreaming of Sunshine - Silver Queen, Naruto
Genre: Arranged Marriage - Spouses Stay Platonic, F/M, Getting Married To Avert A War, Is it arranged marriage if you do the arranging yourself and rope your spouse into it, Minor mentions of death and war, Past Lives of Nara Shikako, Shikako is Korouka, gratuitous metaphors and flowery language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-26
Updated: 2020-07-26
Packaged: 2021-03-06 03:20:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,112
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25536487
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tavina/pseuds/Tavina
Summary: Contentment comes in many forms.Even if peace is the shadow that dogs war’s footsteps.Senju Korouka has always cared more about peace than war, and if this is the way to get it then so be it.
Relationships: Nara Shikako & Senju Butsuma, Nara Shikako & Senju Hashirama, Nara Shikako & Senju Itama, Nara Shikako & Senju Tobirama, Nara Shikako & Uchiha Madara
Comments: 15
Kudos: 530
Collections: Heliocentrism — a Dreaming of Sunshine recursive collection, Just Married Exchange 2020





	ten of cups (life overflows)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mysticaltorque](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mysticaltorque/gifts).



.

Above the sky

Ten cups in an arc

The end of hardship

Sorrow

And rain

.

* * *

Once, she’d been a deer girl.

Once, or was that something that has yet to come?

Memories float upwards, slipping through the water like fish in the river.

Once, she’d been Nara Shikako.

But Nara Shikako blurs, a haze, a fog, indistinct.

The future is yet unwritten.

* * *

This time, she is Senju Korouka, named for incense burners and flowers.

A holy flower, who walked and made flowers bloom.

Last time, she’d been a younger sister.

This time, she is an elder sister, firstborn, proud.

This time, she is a child of the forest.

* * *

Meeting her little brother’s best friend by the river is not exactly the plan, but she has no choice, none at all. Someone has pushed her, forced her to show her hand, so now here she is, fourteen and frantic, running down to the river.

Up ahead, the boy’s chakra looms, and Tobirama who has already alerted their father, will likely have sensed it as well, likely has also sensed _her, even with her chakra pulled tight, even though she travels the forest with nary a whisper of sound_ , but time is a-wasting and there’s no way to know which way the next encounter is going to go.

Her third brother’s always been a better sensor of the two of them, and Hashirama couldn’t sense for shit, but that didn’t matter, not now.

She bursts out of the treeline, sending up startled birds and a rush of leaves.

“Run,” she calls to the boy across the river, one skipped rock across the rushing water. She’s watched Hashirama do it from inside the forest, leaves and branches pulled tight around her like the embrace of a mother long gone, so she knows the way they greet each other. “Run!”

There is no way to time this right -- no way to explain how or why — but time slips from her fingers like the waters of the river, fingers hugging its banks like tree roots into stone, and she sees him turn to flee before she dives back into the underbrush, disappearing into the forest, light and fleet footed as a doe.

When Hashirama arrives, their father and Tobirama on his heels, the clearing is empty, devoid even of birds.

* * *

She stands in the river, waiting for the water to bring her fish when Tobirama arrives, her ten year old brother more confused than sullen, although Hashirama had not read it that way and cried to her about it earlier that evening.

He hadn’t had the skill in him to lie to their father, (not as she has, again and again and again, until one doesn’t know where the lie ended and the truth began, it fit together like a patchwork coat, seamless) and so had borne the bruises and blood for meeting a stranger — unconfirmed but most likely Uchiha, and for speaking of clan secrets, though forgiven for at least having not shared his _name._

But she knows _all_ of her brothers so well, having read the lines and fates of their futures.

Kawarama had fallen, despite her best efforts, but _fate,_ fate itself could be changed.

She had changed it, with one trip to the river.

Itama would live. She would make it so with her own hands alone, if nothing else.

“Aneja?” Tobirama pauses on the bank, even though water is his element, his hands curled loosely into fists. “Why did you go warn the Uchiha?”

She tilts her head to one side. “And what would’ve happened if I didn’t?”

Tobirama considers it. “We would’ve captured him.”

A fish floats by her left foot, dappled in the light of the sun and she gauges where it is by the feel of its chakra — water bends light and deceives the eye — but raises one slow eyebrow. “Would we have?”

Tobirama flushes, thinking about it. “We might’ve killed him.”

She plucks the fish from the river water, easy and sure of her skill. “Well then?” _Is that a good enough answer for you, Otouto?_

He knows she does not approve of killing.

She does not live by death, does not live by war, but where Hashirama wielded only the bullheaded stubbornness of oak trees, a desire to _break_ the world and remake it new into something better, she flowed like the reeds in the river, seeking to break rules by bending their spirit like the river water around her calves while leaving their letters untouched. Perhaps like the reeds clinging to the eddies of the river, she will also bend and bend and rise again, unchanging, true.

And perhaps that is the path to change she is looking for.

She is firstborn. She is eldest and heir, cemented into the role when she made flowers bloom before she turned five.

And when Hashirama had displayed the gifts of their clan at age seven, their father had considered the two of them — his daughter, nine, quiet, serious, with a knife blade of a mind and a gentle touch and his eldest son, seven, loud, brash, with grand dreams shining in his eyes and already rebellion brewing in his mind, and picked what Senju Butsuma could consider the better choice.

Korouka sharpens her naginata against her whetstone, determination steely, and vows to _herself_ peace. The whole world does not need to know.

* * *

“Aneja!”

The weather has turned to winter again, and brought snow and the new year’s with it, winter always a lethargic season for her unless she could stand to commune with the pines, which creaked with the sighing sadness of being born old.

And she’s already a bit too old for her age, a bit too fae for her race, a bit too different looking among siblings, so she doesn’t need the conversations with trees already old before they’ve barely begun to be able to hold her weight.

“Aneja!” Itama calls again, six years old and filled with the brimming enthusiasm of it being the only time of year where there is feasting and food and red packets of coins and when their father might _smile._ “Aneja, you’ve got to come and try the fried meat skewers that Sandoma-jisan has made this year. They’re really good.”

With a laugh, she swings off of where she’d been sitting on the rafters of the loft and musses up Itama’s hair. “Trust you to think of the food, Otouto.”

Itama grumbles, trying to straighten his hair but also follow after her at the same time. “Anejaaaa,” he wails. “I was only trying to get you to come down.”

“Are you telling me that I’m the glutton?” She squishes his cheeks together. “Little Duckboard, that’s such a mean thing to say to a lady.”

“Aneee,” he continues to wail as they head into the main hall. “Aneja, that’s not what I meant at all.”

“Ane,” Hashira comes in from the side hallway, nervous in his new clothing which their father’s sister had given him after losing her only son in battle with the Uchiha a few months ago, when autumn leaves were thick on the river. “There’s no need to tease so harshly is there?” He does not frown, but his eyes are fawn brown, and when he’s reproachful, it brings to mind a tiny deer being kicked repeatedly in the stomach. “‘Tama’s about to cry, look at him.”

She sighs, overdramatically, as though very put upon. “Alright, alright, I shall keep my teasing tongue to myself the next time.”

She spies Tobira in the main hall, dressed in red, though that doesn’t suit him too much (just the same as it doesn’t suit her white hair either) and with light feet goes to join her third brother.

* * *

She is sixteen when she meets Uchiha Madara again, back against the smooth trunk of a beech tree, legs dangling off its branches, so still she could almost pass for tree itself, long white hair in a thick, tight braid, wisps of curls coming loose and free.

With white hair, earth dark eyes, button nose, and terra-cotta skin, she doesn’t truly look the part of a tree spirit, especially since she’s eschewed wearing greens and browns, preferring the pale blue-gray of morning skies and eggshells, autumn colors. Yet, she passes unnoticed anyway, child of the forest with her earth eyes and soft hair, blending in seemingly effortlessly.

Which brings her to Madara stumbling on the ground beneath her tree, just beneath where she sits some twenty feet off the ground.

He’s had a growth spurt recently, all gangly long limbs and coltish look about him as his face lengthens.

What he’s doing running a mission alone this deep in Senju country she is uncertain, but thankfully, Tobirama is out halfway across the country on the border of Wind, some mission their father had not seen fit to inform her of the details of, and she is the only one guarding this stretch of border.

The benefits of paying lip service to conformity — she has the freedom to do as she pleases, and is trusted just as much as the length and breadth of her freedom stretches.

Which is how she knows that something has gone seriously wrong.

His stumbling gait, cracking twigs and blood on the underbrush signals that from half a mile off, and yet still unerringly he makes course towards her, nearly passing her tree.

“You’re not a sensor are you?” She speaks quietly, just loud enough that he could hear her.

He starts, a hand reaching for a sword already, but she is high in the branches, and this is a forest. Her domain, her queendom, here, she reigns.

“ _You_ ,” he snarls, a burst of recognition. “The girl by the river.”

They have not met on the battlefield before, her status as both heir and only daughter being too precious a thing to risk in pitched warfare. Border guarding however, leaves her with plenty of responsibility and still much to do.

However, she is still amused to know that he has yet to learn her name.

It has been two years after all, and white hair is not often a trait of the Senju even if it is also not too rare. She only has a tiny red tattoo on her chin, but it _does_ mirror Tobirama’s, and she reserves the right to be amused if he has not yet noticed it.

She swings a sandaled foot back and forth, wind rustling the green leaves all around her. “Me,” she agrees simply. “Senju Korouka.”

He recoils at this, a little too fast, hand coming up against his still bleeding side.

So he _has_ heard her name then, even if he doesn’t know her face. Curious, but perhaps Hashirama has told him.

She sighs. “If I wanted to kill you it would be easy.” She slips easily from her branch, already prepared to subdue if necessary, but to heal regardless. “Let me look at that.”

He takes a stumbling step backwards. “I don’t need your help, _Senju._ ”

She laughs at this, the sound airy in the golden afternoon light. “And yet you’d let my otouto help you?”

Recognition blooms in his eyes again. “ _You’re_ the heir?”

Perhaps he had expected a Korouma, not a Korouka, because yes, of the major clans, few of them kept to the old traditions — firstborn over first son, and in her case only because she’d made flowers bloom and rice grow and could heal the sick and dying, and she’d done it _better_ than any son of Senju Butsuma could.

She laughs again, and shrugs her shoulders, light cotton swishing as she does. “Just so.”

* * *

Her father returns to the compound after two months of war, and for a brief moment, she realizes he’s getting old.

Hearing his joints pop as he sat down in their family home would do that, she supposes, but more than that, she is sixteen; Hashirama is fourteen; Tobirama is twelve and Itama, little Itama is still only eight years old, a sweet boy, but not a tough one.

And yet, her father, despite being in his early forties, is now considered old. For this time period, for this place, for all the war that has taken its toll on both his body and his mind, twisting both in ways unimaginable, he is getting old.

It is not as if she hates her father. Far from it, as her mother had died long ago while birthing Itama, and while her elder two children could grow flowers to memorialize her no one could heal her properly of her blood loss, so her father has been her sole parent since she was eight.

It is not as if she hates her father, but she does consider him short sighted, pitted in the war as he is against the Uchiha blinded in part, at least, by his hatred and need to protect through killing.

“Otou-sama,” she comes to sit by him in the chair that he’s indicated, leaning her head against his shoulder. “You said you wanted to see me?”

He sighs, the sound heavy and harsh even as he tugs a lock of her white hair — a distant relic of her mother, the woman who had also been his wife though he never spoke of her. “I’m getting old.”

Her breath catches in her throat. Yes, she’d _thought_ that. She really has, but she didn’t want to hear _him_ say that. “You’re not old, Otou-sama.”

“I nearly didn’t make it back this time.” He looks off into the distance, focused on something she could not see. “If it wasn’t for your uncle taking a blow meant for me that I was too slow to dodge I’d have come home in a scroll, Korou-chan.”

She is silent for a moment.

Despite the sorrows that mar her life, she has not been _unhappy._ And she is not ready to be an orphan, despite being sixteen, despite having lived other lives before.

“Otou-sama, why are we at war with the Uchiha?” If it were Hashirama asking, this would provoke outrage, outright. However, with her asking, all it does is make her father laugh, a sharper, broken sound.

“Korou-chan, do you remember how many they’ve killed?”

She hasn’t seen them kill much, it’s true, protected as she is by her father’s wishes that she remain behind to guard the compound, and her own rotation of duties being guarding the borders.

“I do,” and here she bites her tongue because _if we never end the war, there will be seas of broken bodies Otou-sama, even more than the ones we’ve already lost._

But she knows she cannot change him.

His prejudices are baked into his blood and marrow, into his flesh and bone, warping his thoughts and twisting his emotions.

No matter how much she loves him, she cannot change him.

There are few paths, and even fewer that do not lead to an ocean of blood.

But she knows the way, she has seen its light.

* * *

Touka stumbles in, bleeding from several gashes in the places where her armor didn’t quite cover a few days after that.

She helps her cousin strip out of her bloodied armor, hands glowing green to diagnose the damage and stitch the flesh back together, especially the terrible wounds over her back, which had hit her hard enough to crack the back plates.

The bruising had darkened to purplish black, but with enough coaxing, she lightened them to a faint tinge of green, then yellow, then back to normal skin.

All the while, Touka rages, unceasing, seething over the Uchiha who had done this to her, the Uchiha in general for taking her brother, Taruki, earlier that year, how inhumane and deserving of death they happened to be.

“Do you really believe that?” She pauses for a moment after she’s done to examine her handiwork.

“It’s _true._ ” Touka turns to look at Korouka over her shoulder, dark eyes questioning. “What, you don’t think they deserve to die after what they’ve done to us? Everything they’ve taken?”

Underlying is the implication of anger, of guilt, grief, and rage.

And while she does grieve the loss of Taruki, who had a warm smile, and grieves even more what that has done to Sondama-jisan and his wife, and what anger it had left in Touka, she has little blame for the Uchiha who killed him.

It was battle. It was business.

And no one’s hands are clean.

“I know you don’t go out to fight them but—”

“You think I’m naive.” She’s rarely so abrupt or so blunt, but the whispers of her naivety have been louder in recent months, with the way that Otou-sama kept her from the horrors of the battlefield — and Otou-sama is a hard man, living in a harder world, so his disinclination to send her to the battlefield does not go unnoticed — unaware that she dreamed of blood and death, and blood and death, and the years and years of horror in the future if she could not _carve_ a peace out of the position she’d been given in life.

She _has_ to make peace. Properly.

Or else watch the entire world be suffused in blood.

Whatever that is, she doesn’t think that’s naive.

“You’ve never seen them take a chunk out of your own _brother._ ” Touka has leapt back on her feet now, pacing the floor. “You’ve never heard the screams, have you even understood—”

“And how many of them have you killed, Touka?”

It is battle. It is business, and she _knows_ that her cousin does not have clean hands.

“What do you think that makes _them_ feel? They are only human. The same as you and I.” Without her hands, perhaps Uchiha Madara would’ve died.

She knows what he had done in the future, knows it had happened because of vengeance, because of grief, because of madness, knows that the whole world bled for the death of his brother, but she had looked at him and seen a boy, not even out of growing into his armor, bleeding in enemy territory.

She had not seen a madman.

“The next thing you’ll say is that you believe in _peace._ After everything they’ve done.”

“I do believe in peace.” She might not have experienced it in the future either, but she _wants_ it. She believes that it can be achieved. “So that no one else has to die fighting. So Taruki doesn’t have to listen to his sister rave about how much blood she wants to spill, as if blood spilled would make him happy or bring him back.”

She rises to go, because this conversation is finished. “And as for not seeing them kill my brother…” she pauses, thinking of the boy’s grave marker she affixed flowers to every Obon. “Kawarama was eight.”

Vengeance, in the end, means nothing at all.

The balm for the living to make them think they’ve done something, when in reality, it is only a poison that poisons the one who wields it, twisting what is bright and true into something much sadder.

Touka doesn’t speak to her for two months, but one night, Korouka hears that she breaks down crying before her parents, anger finally giving way to grief, and maybe, maybe that will be all she ever gets.

* * *

She is seventeen, and the spring sky opens in torrential downpours and heavy mud.

It is the north of Fire Country, and she is still searching for Hashirama, who has seemingly vanished despite never learning how to mask his chakra, and since Tobirama is ill and Itama is no good as a sensor and too young besides, she’d been sent out as last resort instead.

However, now it pours and she is near Hatake territory, which means find shelter, wait out the downpour and hope she isn’t picked up by one of their tracking teams.

By all rights, she shouldn’t be trespassing, the Hatake have aligned themselves with the Uchiha recently, and there’s more than a good chance she’d run into an Uchiha squad.

Which is of course, why her luck runs out and she is now halfway on her way inside a cave before noticing that it is already occupied.

He is fifteen now, growing into new wide shoulders, that mane of wild hair and his new height.

“Oh, it’s you.” He holds out a blanket. “You look like a drowned rat, Senju.”

Rather bewildered, she takes the proffered blanket, throwing it about her shoulders for some comfort against the chill. “I’m not entirely certain you’re in much position to talk, Madara-kun.”

He did, after all, look just as thoroughly soaked, hair plastered to his face and ears still dripping down his back onto the cave floor full of twigs and debris. Clearly, he hadn’t arrived much earlier than her.

He shudders, as if expecting a spider to crawl up his arm and burrow into his shirt. “You still look like a drowned rat.”

“Are you cold?” He’d given _her_ his blanket, which means he has none left for himself.

He shoots her a look as if saying ‘as _if_ ’ right as he shudders with the cold.

Something about him reminds her of Tobira, so with a sigh, she shuffles closer, throwing an end of the blanket over him. “Don’t protest, Uchiha,” she mutters. “This is your blanket originally anyway.”

He makes a noise in the back of his throat when her shoulder brushes his, but she says nothing for a bit. “Do you mean it?” she asks, as she thinks about it.

“What?”

“Do you mean it when you say you want peace?” Time is ticking after all, and every year more funerals are held, no end to this war in sight.

Time is ticking and she’s got to have some idea of how to end this war before it can take her little brothers or anyone else she loves so dearly.

“Yeah, I do mean it.” He sighs. “But it’s not like my old man or yours would care for peace yeah?”

“Yeah,” she agrees, arms wrapped around her knees. “Haven’t the faintest wish for peace in this lifetime.”

Which isn’t true, but she can hardly say ‘Otou-sama would like peace, a peace where every Uchiha is _dead._ ’ because that doesn’t help anyone in this situation.

They shiver in unison for a bit.

“Well, there’s at least the chance of peace when they’re gone.” He ducks his head when she turns to him, turning his face away, because that had _not_ been at all filial.

And something takes root in her mind.

* * *

She is eighteen years old, another year has slipped by her, and they are running out of time. That winter, while the war was on pause, Otou-sama had fallen sick with a cough that would not go away, despite her and Hashirama’s insistence on checking him over. And despite all the signs that say he is _not fine,_ he refuses to say anything else about the matter.

That stupid plan that she had during the spring before has now come directly to the fore.

There might be hope for them all yet, but for that she will need—

“Hashira?” She looks and finds her second brother in the west fields, mud up to his elbows as he carefully turns plots of dirt for the sprint planting with earth jutsu. “I’ve got to talk to you.”

He turns to her with a wide smile, tanned under the years under the summer sun, terra-cotta skin dripping with sweat. “What’s happened, Aneja?”

He’s never begrudged her the position of their father’s heir, more comfortable in the rice fields than he is on the battlefront.

He has a gentle heart and a dreamer’s mind, and she has lived a future where he breaks, even though she has not seen that, was distanced from it by time and lack of connection, and she will break a whole world before it can break him.

Thus, her foolish plan, which she puts forth not only for the lives of her brothers, her father, her clan, all the other countless senseless lives lost in this war, but for dreams as well, the dream that no other children would have to fight old men’s wars, dreams that boys with gentle hearts do not have to harden them, dreams that vengeance might turn to co-existence if not friendship.

“Do you want to end the war?” If he has any dedication to this cause at all, in a world where she’s born some of the responsibility for him, then he has to think of now, and think of what he’s willing to give up to ensure peace.

He turns to her, dark eyes sparking with painful hope. “Aneja, you know how to end the war?”

“It comes with a cost,” she cautions him. Everything worth having in this world comes with a price tag worth paying for.

“I—” he worries his lower lip with his teeth. “I’ll hear it, Aneja. Because it’s you.”

That’s what she thought. Hashira is hard to judge wrongly, given how open and warm he’s always been.

“I need you to ask Uchiha Madara to come to the river for me, and then I need you to distract Otou-sama from my absence for longer than a day.” By that point, it won’t matter if Otou-sama sends someone to fetch her. She and Madara will be halfway to Grass Country, (at least, she hopes so) and it will not matter then.

Hashira worries his bottom lip for another moment more, but the hope in his eyes has already set into determination. “Consider it done, Aneja.”

* * *

She is sitting by the river when he arrives, dressed in a pale shade of blue, her bare feet dipped in the water, schools of tiny fish and tadpoles playing around her toes.

There is a sprig of ivy threaded through her hair, honeysuckle in her hands.

Fit for a wedding bouquet. Just as she is dressed well enough for a wedding.

“You’re still not a very good sensor, Madara-kun.” She has heard him coming some meters off, and felt the bonfire flame of his chakra.

A good thing that Tobira had been sent west again earlier that week guarding a nobleman who had asked for him specifically and not due back until much later. It gives her the perfect opening to set this plan in motion.

He pauses on the other side of the water, though that would do nothing to stop her if she wanted his head on a tree branch. He is in the forest after all, and the forest is hers to command.

How easily he does trust her second brother.

She hopes he never stops trusting Hashira.

Perhaps, with this plan, there’s a world out there where he never has to.

“Hashirama said that you had a plan to make peace.” He pauses again before he says the next words, as stoic and serious as the mountainsides. “He also said it involved sacrifice.”

“It does.” The plan she thinks of involves sacrificing the rest of both their lives. If that is not sacrifice in the name of peace, she doesn’t know what is.

“My head won’t bring anyone peace.” She almost laughs. He is so serious, so certain she has come up with some new way to torture him. He might have shared some moments of his life with her, but still, he thinks of her as an enemy.

But then, she is a Senju. He’s an Uchiha.

It would take some time before they could put down their weapons.

“I don’t want your head.” She’s fought long and hard within the clan for her family to see the Uchiha as people. She doesn’t want peace built on bloodshed and threats of violence, for that is no peace at all. “I want your hand, Madara-kun.”

For a moment, the entire world holds its breath, shocked by the suggestion, stilled beyond words.

No Senju has _ever_ proposed a marriage between clans.

“You...want to cut off one of my hands?” He holds out a hand across the water. “I don’t, understand how that will bring us peace.”

Ah, perhaps this is another one of those phrases that people don’t yet use.

Or perhaps he’s being obtuse.

The world roars back into noise, a flight of starlings bursting from the trees.

She smiles, regardless. “Marry me, Madara-kun. I’m my father’s heir and you're your father’s. We can always force the peace treaty through marriage.”

He hesitates for a moment, hand still extended over the river. “Are you sure that would work?”

And she remembers that he’s still sixteen, hasn’t lived nearly as long as she has, doesn’t know what a slippery slope they are perched on. “Does your father love you?”

Otou-sama is a hard man, made harder by the terrors of the world, by losing a son, a nephew, three brothers, and a wife, and if he does not bend instead of break this time, a daughter as well.

She wagers this on the love her father has for her, on the losses he has already had to bear, and she predicts he will bend.

Meet the Uchiha halfway.

He snorts. “What sort of question is that?”

She looks up at him, the downward quirk of his lips, the spark of amusement in his eyes. “Well then, is it enough to wager the end of the war on?”

He hesitates, a moment, but no more. He flicks his hand up, and light as the stone she skipped across the river the day they met, she flits across the river.

She does not love him, but perhaps someday she might.

* * *

The old legend says that the daughter of trees marries the son of flames in the Ginkaku-ji shrine out of love.

And from the pair of star crossed lovers, a peace treaty rises like a phoenix from the ashes of war.

But contentment is spun from many forms.

A hasty peace treaty.

A tense ceasefire that takes a few years before it starts to fade towards amicable.

The smile of a brother.

A hand to hold.

A handful of flowers grown on a little boy’s grave.

The day she hears Touka laugh as she steps into the shrine, dressed in white, the dark haired man who is to be her husband waiting for her.

And when she buries her father, it is in a plot of land that does not weep with blood.

The oak that grows from it is tall and proud, straight and true.

The branches of it holds her like arms, the man who is her husband sitting at its roots.

And life overflows.

**Author's Note:**

> Well. I cannot for the life of me write a short marriage fic, but I have made here, a valiant attempt.


End file.
